While other MediaPost newsletters and articles remain free to all ... our new Research Intelligencer service is reserved for paid subscribers ...

Subscribe today to gain access to the every Research Intelligencer article we publish as well as the exclusive daily newsletter, full access to The MediaPost Cases, first-look research and daily insights from Joe Mandese, Editor in Chief.

Commentary

The 'Westworld' Mystique: Violence In A High-Tech World

HBO’s "Westworld" would seem to be TV’s "it" show of the moment, and for good reason.

Just three episodes into its second season (No. 3 aired last night -- Sunday), the show has
already been renewed for a third season. The show is one of those that is talked about incessantly after each episode premieres.

I even read somewhere that the Internet is full of bloggers and
other essayists who dissect every episode as if the show is the centerpiece of a college course and they are required to fill a blue book about it every Monday.

This show is nothing if not
timely since, at its core, it is about technology run amok. And to zero in a little more specifically on this theme, it is about the unintended consequences that can arise when humans create
technological systems that are so complex that in the long run, they become too unwieldy to control.

advertisement

advertisement

The show conjures up a world in which humanoid robots are designed to fulfill the fantasies
of human tourists who visit the Westworld theme park.

Old West adventures are just some of the offerings available. In the park's many sections, visitors can also take part in simulated
fantasy excursions and experiences in various exotic locations around the world.

It's all thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics. Predictably, the whole carefully
planned thing goes awry when the human operators and managers of this huge facility lose control of the robotic inhabitants that they themselves created and programmed.

In
“Westworld,” this loss of control leads to carnage. Humans and their robot counterparts (who are so realistic that they spurt real blood, or a reasonable facsimile) are shot, stabbed,
slashed, clubbed and hanged.

In scene after scene, corpses in various states of disfigurement and decomposition litter the streets of the park's fictional Old West town, a patio in another
portion of the park, and the corridors and ultra-modern laboratories where the human managers and maintenance personnel once worked and controlled the robots that are now massacring them.

The
scenes of corpses are reminiscent of Jonestown and other scenes of massacres. In some instances, at least for a fleeting second or two, the scenes even suggest the photos and newsreels of Nazi
concentration camp victims.

Recently, while watching one episode of “Westworld” in which scenes depicting the aftermath of mass death seemed to come one after the other, I wondered
if this was what the scenes of real-life massacres look like after they are over -- in an elementary school in Connecticut, for example, or an Orlando nightclub or at the site of an outdoor concert in
Las Vegas, or a hundred other places.

For me, like so much of TV today, the scenes of almost constant bloody violence make “Westworld” difficult to watch for, among other reasons,
their similarity to the violence that is happening all around us here in the real world.

But wait a minute. Even as I write that, I realize that for many people today, it is not difficult to
watch “Westworld” or any number of violent TV shows and movies.

On another cable channel, a series whose most conspicuous trait is carnage and violent death on a grand scale --
“The Walking Dead” on AMC -- is the highest-rated scripted TV series in America.

When considering the topic of extreme violence in our everyday entertainments, I struggle to
understand how or why people can take it all in without suffering some sort of PTSD-like effects.

Well, one might say that these depictions are not real, only simulated -- although they are
realistic looking. Moreover, they involve characters and situations that are far removed from us. They are fictional. In “Westworld,” the events take place in a facility that does not
exist.

However, it seems also true that in an era of realistic, violent movies, TV shows, video games and virtual reality, it is reasonable to conclude that at least some people (if not many)
are living in their heads and having violent fantasies.

A few of them then go out into the world, and with the help of weaponry that is not difficult to obtain, act out their violent
fantasies. As in “Westworld,” the result is carnage.

If this is accurate (and I am just a TV critic, not a social scientist), then it can be said that the technology we have on
hand today is not entirely within our control because, like in “Westworld,” the technological world we have made is having some consequences that no one intended.